CIA Successfuly Conceals Bay of Pigs History

[Octafish]

22. Corporations never have to die. What Vol. III found Dulles told the 'Economic Royalists'...

The Two Stories About the Bay of Pigs You Never Heard

by David M. Barrett

Mr. Barrett’s new book is The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (University Press of Kansas, 2005). He is Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University.

EXCERPT...

(2) Days before Christmas 1960, DCI Allen Dulles held an important, and I would say scandalous, meeting in New York. In attendance, Pfeiffer writes, “were the Vice President for Latin America of Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Chairman of the Cuban-American Sugar Company, the President of the American Sugar Domino Refining Company, the President of the American & Foreign Power Company, the Chairman of the Freeport Sulphur Company, and representatives from Texaco, International Telephone and Telegraph, and other American companies with business interests in Cuba. The tenor of the conversation was that it was time for the U.S. to get off dead center and take some direct action against Castro.”

The corporate leaders had many ideas along these lines for Dulles. They included burning sugar cane fields, ruining refineries, interrupting electric power supplies, and putting an embargo on food and medicines going into Cuba. Dulles opposed the embargo idea and told the corporate leaders that he was not in business of policy planning. That, he probably added, was the job of “Higher Authority,” i.e, the United States president. He did comment (Pfeiffer writes) that “what he was interested in was getting rid of Castro as quickly as possible, and in this field, he had direct responsibility and would welcome any ideas or suggestions on how this might be achieved.”

The timing of this meeting was highly sensitive. Republican Eisenhower was soon to exit the presidency, so there was little chance that he would have CIA dislodge Castro (though, as Pfeiffer writes, Ike had insisted that CIA develop effective plans and forces to do so). It was Democrat Kennedy, a proponent of action against Castro during his presidential campaign, who would have to decide whether or not to authorize some version of what CIA had planned. By blabbing to the corporate leaders about wanting to get rid of Castro as soon as possible, Dulles did a disservice to Kennedy. If JFK had chosen in the spring of 1961 not to authorize CIA to invade Cuba, it wouldn’t have been just those thousand-plus Cuban exiles who would have charged Kennedy with a cowardly abandonment; some of the corporate leaders surely would have leaked word of the new president’s “weakness.”

Furthermore, Dulles had endangered CIA’s reputation—if critics of the Agency had known of this meeting, they would have charged that CIA was (in the words of Dulles’ own underling, Tracy Barnes) “protecting economic royalists.” At a minimum, as Pfeiffer writes, corporate interests played a “sometimes overactive” role in support of the anti-Castro efforts.6

Beyond that, the word “covert” means secret. At a time when Eisenhower and Kennedy fervently believed (and told Dulles) that secrecy should shroud CIA’s Cuba plans, the DCI had been horribly indiscreet.

CONTINUED...

http://hnn.us/article/14951